TeXShop and BibTeX for lazy guys - automatic call of bibtex

If you want to write a larger scientific document, like a diploma or doctoral thesis, you surely will use bibtex for creating your bibliography (and especially for the German guys: don't just copy and paste... but really use a good bibliography).

Functionalizing the "Scan-To"-button of Brother all-in-one printers for Ubuntu 10.10

This is a mere condensation of all the information given on the Brother website and my post on the partner blog. The procedure is valid for Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 with respect to at least the models DCP-7010, MFC-7420, MFC-7820N - connected via USB, probably for more. Please consult the Brother website if in doubt.

Update 2013-01-20: same works with a MFC-7360N.  (Use the packages appropriate for this model in the section below instead) The only change is, that the new scan-to-key tool has moved all its files to /opt/brother/scanner so put all scan scripts there and edit the appropriate .cfg file there.

Help for helpless copy cases - terminal for the Mac User

A friend of mine had big trouble in copying data from his harddrive to an external one. For whatever reason, Finder stopped with strange error warnings that a folder could not be created because it was already there - and there was no way to click "try again".

Teaching my Mac the correct encoding for LaTeX files from Windows

Opening my Windows tex files in TeXShop resulted in unreadable umlauts and special characters due to the different file encoding (I normally used ISO Latin 2 on Windows). Of course, if you take the "Open File" dialog, you can choose the encoding at the bottom in a drop-down menu, but this takes some time and it is simply much easier to double-click...

You can, however, set the standard encoding to be used in the "Settings" dialog under "Source" in the field "encoding" (I defaulted to ISO Latin 2).

Synchronising more than one Google Calendar with an iPod touch/iPhone and iCal

Here the short short version of how-to sync more than one Google calendar with your iPhone/iPod Touch using iCal.

KDE 3.5 on MacOS 10.6 mainly for Kile

Kile is a very nice and comfortable LaTeX editor (yes, and it runs under MacOS 10.6 - hint hint hint for avocadohead). It is installed quite comfortably using MacPorts.

Matplotlib, NumPy and SciPy for Python 2.6 on MacOS 10.6 - the hard way

Prerequisites: have Macports and Python 2.6 installed on MacOS 10.6 (for 10.5 users, please note the side note at the bottom of this post) as explained e.g. in this blog post.

Useful software add-ons for MacOS 10.6

This list is by far not complete and unordered, but more a mere reminder to myself and for interested people and will be updated (thanks to a friend who had always a tip handy, as soon as I ran into problems during changing from the Windows to the MacOS world - see his Mac Blog - I also stick to many of his suggestions, which I will not always repeat here)

Samba 3.4, Webmin 1.510 and some trouble

For some odd reason, my webmin is not able to correctly create users in the samba module unsing smbpasswd.

Firefox 3.6.3 and the error console

After an update of Firefox I got a really annoying behaviour: the error console just popped up randomly showing css format errors and other stuff. Disabling the reporting of those errors didn't help, until I found in a thread somewhere on the internet (sorry, forgot to bookmark the link) that mouse gestures extensions might cause that. Indeed, disabling exactly this extension (in my case "All-in-one Gestures") immediately led to a hassle free Firefox.

To be honest, this problem actually showed up on a Windows machine

Update:
With the following version 3.6.4 the problem vanished.

FLEXlm license manager server on Ubuntu

This is not specifically for Ubuntu on a Mac, but rather a hint for myself getting the license manager for e.g. IDL running on an arbitrary Ubuntu Server.

Thunderbird 3 on MacOS 10.6

I haven't figured out yet, why this happens, but here are the symptoms:

Updating from Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 to 3.0 yields in a perfectly usable Thunderbird 3 including all emails and setting, but each time I want to close Thunderbird, it does not respond any more and has to be killed.

Installing ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) on a Mac Book Pro 5,5

First (can't say it often enough): BACKUP ALL YOUR DATA. While you can use e.g. the free version of Superduper! to keep a bootable clone copy of your system on an external harddrive partition, you have TimeMachine as a very convenient program to keep your data backuped, so there is NO EXCUSE for you to not have backups, just in case you accidentally crash your system.

Installing rEFIt and opensuse 11.1

This post is actually just a copy of the post found here for the sake of completeness.

MacOS 10.6, python and PIL

Since I got a python script from avocadohead (kudos and thanks for saving a lot of time) for easily creating a plain html gallery with thumbnails using imagemagick, I needed to get python running. The version included in MacOS 10.6 is known somewhat troublesome when installing the PIL library so I chose the easy way: